Blizzard to take up to 15 percent of Diablo III real-money auction house sales

Blizzard is going to take a cut of all in-game items sales for Diablo III.

Since its initial announcement last summer, Blizzard's decision to let Diablo III players buy and sell in-game items for real money through a centrally controlled, in-game auction house has drawn controversy. Today's announcement of the specific fees and conditions for those auctions seems unlikely to calm those angry that Blizzard is trying to "cash in" on the game's second-hand digital goods market.

In the real-money auction house, Blizzard will charge a flat fee of $1 (or a rough local equivalent) for sales of unique equipment like armor, weapons, and accessories, or take a 15 percent cut for sales of common, "stackable" commodities like gems, materials, and gold. Even in the gold-based version of the auction house, which uses in-game currency exclusively, Blizzard will deduct a 15 percent fee from each item's sale price. That's a move that should help stem inflation as gold continues to be created throughout the in-game economy.

Sellers will be faced with an additional 15 percent fee if they want the purchase price to be transferred to a third-party service like PayPal. Blizzard also warns that "additional fees from PayPal may apply." The only way to avoid these transfer fees is by putting the sale proceeds into a Battle.net balance, which can be used to purchase digital editions of Blizzard games as well as certain in-game purchases in World of Warcraft.

This is a major change from the grey market for in-game goods that sprung up around Diablo II, which operated through third-party websites and chat rooms, cutting Blizzard out of the process entirely. Blizzard insists that consolidating the market within Diablo III, and eliminating cheating and item duplication through a required persistent Internet connection, will make the item sales process safer and more convenient. Taking direct control of the market will also help stem "numerous customer-service and game-experience issues" caused by Diablo II item sales through "unsecure third-party organizations," the company said.

Regional servers and technical details

In-game auctions in Diablo III will be listed for 48 hours before being returned to the initial seller (for no fee), and players will be limited to ten active auctions at a time in each auction house. The restriction, Blizzard said, should "ensure that players focus on listing high-quality items that have a good chance of being purchased."

While equipment can be sold in a standard auction or for a "Buy it Now"-style offering price, Blizzard has an interesting sales system set up for the more common commodities. All commodities of the same type will be thrown into a unified marketplace pool, where sellers will be able to easily purchase them at the current best-available price. Blizzard says this system should help eliminate the kind of "search spam" that occurs when digital markets are flooded with identical items at a wide range of prices.

International players will be split into three distinct servers for real-money auction purposes. The Americas server will cover the US, Canada, and Latin America, as well as Australia, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia (making the server name something of a misnomer, but never mind that). The Europe server will cover all European countries, plus Middle East and African nations. The Asia server covers South Korea, Taiwan, Macau and Hong Kong.

While players will be able to use a "Global Play" option to connect with friends on other servers, they will only be able to access the real-money auction house for their local country's server. Players on the Asian server are out of luck on this score; they won't have access to a real money auction house when the feature launches, Blizzard said.

In fact, all players are going to have to wait a bit longer than expected to access the real-money auction house. Blizzard now says it won't be available until a week after the game's May 15 launch. Those that purchase a digital version of the game after that launch will also have to wait three days to use the feature, "for security reasons."

Blizzard reconfirmed that it will not be offering items in the auction house directly—all sold items will be posted by players who earned them through standard gameplay. In addition, players on the game's maximum Hardcore difficulty will have access to an exclusive, gold-only auction house featuring only items from other Hardcore players.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, there's a maximum per-item sale price of $250 (or 100 billion in-game gold) at each auction house. So get ready to save up for a while if you want those rarest items.

Update: The original version of this article incorrectly stated that a Battle.net subscription could be used to pay for a World of Warcraft subscription, and was unclear on the process for getting sales proceed into a PayPal account. We regret the error.

Kyle Orland / Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in Pittsburgh, PA.